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A Letter from Gaza – 2054

You know, everything has changed, even we have changed, and our problems are not related to power struggles anymore, or to suppressive policies. Ours are of the type that require a dim light, a shrink, and a comfy couch.

Is it because we’re now sixty-three? Wasn’t that prophet Mohammad’s age when he died? Do you remember how they explained to us in religion classes how the Sahabah would pour cold water on his forehead and it would evaporate? What a terrifying image. Aren’t our city streets historically (no one uses “historically” these days) an extension of the fevered prophet’s forehead? How many rockets have been poured on them to evaporate? Do you remember?

Some days ago, our common friend Hassan (Hassan who would masturbate to Tzipi Livni’s picture, do you remember him?) was driving me through the way to Arish where we went to have fish. He asked me “Do you miss the sound of shelling?” I answered him, “Unfortunately”. My consolation, perhaps, is that the kids aren’t like me. They’re busy with normal things: passing the bill for gay marriage, a music concert of a band whose name I can’t pronounce, festivals and exhibits and other things of the sort. What can I say? I watch them as they come with their friends to the bar and I listen to the noise of their discussions and I realize the qualitative difference. One time they almost broke a table as they argued about the new minister of interior and her accomplishments. They’re crazy!

Everything has changed my friend but the sound of the sea hasn’t. I write to you with its voice coming from the bar window, gentle and spun like rugs. I write to you a line and take a look at the sea. I gaze and grasp my memory and squeeze it as my grandmother would do the mop, trying to rebuild scenes that have long past. I go for instance into summoning that morning when I came with my cousins five years ago to swim at five at dawn. The sea stretched out before us like a mirror. The water was clear and so were we. There were others on the beach. A bunch of Hamas personnel. Do you remember Hamas?

Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but you cannot know when the light inside dies and your body decides that the time has come to rest. I also won’t give you empty promises. Yes, everything has changed and we’ve become, you and I and all those of our generation, more like walking statues in a country that has gone back to walk the normal life line, taking its time to style its hair and go to the movies on the weekend. But I swear by our shared love for Knafeh and earth-air rockets that the sea hasn’t changed.

This big blue is as it was. It remembers the martyrs by name and picture. It knows how we cried, our diaspora, how we sang, and how many love relationships we got sick of, destroyed by the accounts settling of our region and times. Speaking of love, how are things with you, you bastard? Come tell me of your latest adventures. Come let’s sit by the beach of our sea that hasn’t changed. Book the first flight and come. I’m inviting you for a good beer!

These texts were selected at moments of impotence in the face of recurrent events.
The first two, Kayyal’s and Omar’s, were selected in 2015 when my friend Benjamín García and I decided to publish a bilingual Arabic-Spanish anthology that would contain a selection of Palestinian and Mexican blog entries and translate them into Arabic and Spanish. The motive was rather simple: both of us were ardent readers of our respective national blogospheres and have been worriedly witnessing their collapse in front of our eyes. Once a free territory for insomniac individuals’ profound and authentic reflections defying all rules of grammar and morals, we were witnessing how the vast majority of bloggers—similar to Bertrand Russell’s turkey—were eventually induced to the use of the ephemeral “social media” and “smart phones” applications that raze everything in their path. Seeing how the “rich, diverse, free web that I loved is dying” (in the words of Iranian blogger Hossein Derkhashan), Benjamín and I desperately decided to print a book we called Tadwiniyyat: desde la blogósfera México-Palestina. Printed in Mexico City in May of 2016, the book contains 10 Mexican blog entries translated into Arabic and 10 Palestinian blog entries translated into Spanish. Our book was freely distributed in the city’s streets and its texts were read out on various occasions. Kayyal’s and Omar’s blog entries, written in 2014, appeared in the anthology in Spanish translation.
The other three texts (Yawda, Miqdar and Tuffaha) were written in July/August 2014 during Israel’s war on the population of the Gaza Strip, the third in seven years. This time, the Israeli army officially translated its war operation into English as “Operation Protective Edge.” In Hebrew, for the Israelis, the operation that killed 2,220 Palestinians, including 551 children, was named Tzuk Eitan: Mighty Cliff. On July 22nd, while war was broadcasted on tv, a group of poets and artists from Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Argentina, Syria, Guatemala, Iran, the United States, Switzerland and Palestine met in Mexico City’s Casa Refugio—a cultural center and residency for writers who have been targets of political persecution in their home countries—to read the Spanish translations of a number of short texts written on the social network by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and abroad.
In Abilio Estévez’ “Why do I write?,” published here on Specimen, we read that “maybe it’s true that whenever a person doesn’t have any answers he writes a story.” Isn’t that how we feel about writing, reading and translating, after all?